Private equity firm Apollo Management will buy Citigroup’s real estate investment business. The New York-based firm signed a letter of intent to acquire Citi Property Investors, which has $3.5 billion in assets.

The deal, which is expected to close within three months, will more than triple Apollo’s real-estate assets. The p.e. firm does not plan major layoffs at the Citi unit following the acquisition.

The purchase also reunites Joseph Azrack and CPI. Azrack led the group from 2004 until 2008, and now works on Apollo’s real-estate platform.

Citi has been under pressure from the U.S. government—which owns 27% of the bank—to sell off more than $500 billion in assets. The firm is also in advanced talks with hedge fund seeder SkyBridge Capital about its fund of hedge funds business. Citi also plans to sell its private equity unit.

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We are accustomed to splitting trading into technical and fundamental buckets. Both involve crunching data; one set includes market fundamentals and the other pure price data. Alternative data is a third bucket that is gaining traction.